It’s so hard being a dinosaur. Keeping up with the changing trends in what is and is not acceptable is tiring. We have learned and internalised that the sexual objectification of women, at least by men is a modern sin. It seems that the sexual objectification of women by women is quite ok.

At the February council meeting, Cllr Josh Garfield stood up to speak on the budget debate. It is difficult to hear on the video, but it is very apparent that members of the audience saw fit to hiss and jeer at him.

A by-election is not a general election. Turnout is typically low. Only 31,107 voters bothered to cast a vote in the Rochdale by-election, (compared to 46,476 in the 2019 general election). It is a chance to give the government a bit of a kicking without disturbing anything too much.

Newham Council have agreed, after much internal dissent, a budget. Central to the budget is the plan to sell £16m worth of capital assets.

On the same day as the council meeting that agreed the budget the BBC disclosed that 19 English councils had been given permission to sell their capital assets in order to subsidise their revenue costs (see list below).

Amongst the changes at the cabinet meeting in February, the threatened cuts to the commissioned youth work were reversed. My London reported the U-Turn which will restore the money to commissioned youth work budget.

How does a party that denies the ‘block-vote’ effect stand up to a challenge from an organisation which seeks to capitalise on a block-vote?

Labour’s Islamophobia Policy says the following:

Seven voluntary sector groups have written to the mayor and the chief exec to protest the cuts in youth service funding, (see text below). The mayor has planned to take some £300,000 from the youth service budget over the next two years.

It is evident that Mayor Fiaz is now struggling for her political survival. At the cabinet meeting on Tuesday 20th February she was planning to submit her budget plans for approval.

Key to any mayor’s success is their ability to pass a budget. It is their ability to raise and spend money that shapes their programme. If they don’t have control of their budget, if they lose the support of their party, they become lame-ducks.

In an embarrassing volte face, the Labour Party have been forced to remove their endorsement of Azhar Ali. Labour was defending a majority of over 9,000 and Ali was facing a serious challenge from George Galloway. Both men were seeking to capitalize on the Muslim vote in a by-election that was dominated by events in Gaza. Does that sound familiar?

We see that Momentum stalwart, Tahir Mirza has announced that he will be standing for the Independents against (Sir) Stephen Timms MP in the forthcoming general election.

Along with the rest of the country, we are assuming that there will be a general election in either the summer or the autumn of this year. Members in the West Ham and Beckton constituency have begun to murmur about choosing the candidate. It seems that some of them would like to participate in the democratic process.

We understand that, in the twinning of strong constituency Labour Parties with their less robust colleagues in distant shires, the CLPs in Newham have been twinned with the party in Ipswich.

It seems that there has been some movement on the matter of the standards committee report. Readers will recall that Newham Council spent several tens of thousands of pounds of council -taxpayers’ money on an investigation into allegations made by Cllr Terry Paul, against the mayor for allegations of bullying towards staff and councillors.

Our crystal ball is a little cloudy. We are thus, unable to say whether Labour’s problems are a temporary blip or whether we are seeing a permanent realignment.

There has got to be just the smallest sense of irony in the fact that Fiaz and Labour are slashing the grant to The Theatre Royal at the same time as they are spending more than that in seeking to become the Borough of Culture.

Our vast army of correspondents has revealed an interesting titbit. Former Newham mayor, Sir Robin Wales has been selected to stand as Labour’s Police and Crime Commissioner candidate for Suffolk in this May’s election.

In 1997, Tony Blair took office to the strains of “things, can only get better”.

We see from the Newham cabinet papers that (some of) the results of the annual residents’ survey have been released. For reasons best known to themselves, the authors of the cabinet papers have chosen to show the movement between only two years.

Once upon a time there was a mayor, he whose name could not be mentioned. Back in those days £2.5 million was spent every year on an ‘every child programme’. (This mayor had a balanced budget and could invest in things that were important, err, like children.) 

We previously reported that a report was presented to the members of the Standards Advisory Committee at their scheduled January meeting. They, sensibly, decided that they needed more than a couple of minutes to go through the 100 plus pages.